Write for God

At 18 weeks' gestation, a baby can suck its thumb.

We have a new granddaughter who likes nothing more than to eat and sleep. Fair enough when you won’t be three months old for a few weeks yet. Soiled diapers and spit-up are in the mix there, too.

The quality that makes Isabella so beautiful is her pure innocence. Her big, dark eyes look up with curiosity at anyone who holds her, feeds her or makes her smile. Tiny dimples mark her cheeks when she finds something amusing. Isabella has two older brothers; all three were closely spaced and all three are delightful.

It’s a cinch that some of that innocence will be lost in their  kid world of who took someone’s toy and who deserves a good snitching for something done away from their parents’ eyes. For now, the “big brothers” who are toddlers themselves do their best to kiss the infant when they’re not stealing her bottle.

Isabella’s sweet-baby beauty is a wonder to behold. She doesn’t discriminate and the world is either having a full stomach or an empty one. Her dark hair sticks up, but she’s not worried about bad hair days. Life for a baby is a wonderfully simple concept.

Looking at Isabella is a joy for a proud Grandma like me. Our oldest grandchild, two-year-old JJ, can already call me “Gammaw,” which is better than just about anything I could be addressed as. The middle grandchild, a lovely little blue-eyed angel named Christian, doesn’t talk much yet, but we spent some quiet moments yesterday picking weeds that he found as beautiful as flowers.

My grandchildren and all the children in the world are miracles created by God. It doesn’t matter what their skin color or national origin are:  “Babies are God’s opinion that the world should go on,” as poet Carl Sandburg said.

The tragedy of abortion is that sweet angels like Isabella cannot bring a smile to someone’s face or grow up to change the world. Every child is God’s masterpiece, no matter whether they’re perfectly healthy  in the world’s opinion or whether they were created before Mom or Dad decided they didn’t want them.

I know a wonderful Catholic couple that adopted three beautiful baby girls whose parents couldn’t care for them. Young parents unable to provide a home for the babies gave them to this infertile couple that wanted nothing more than children. If those little girls had been aborted, a couple who are now excellent parents wouldn’t have had children to love and a young mother who might have had an abortion knows that children she conceived are happy and well cared for. Everyone wins, especially the children who found loving arms and a safe home.

In 1972, the debut issue of the feminist Ms magazine published a list of 53 women who admitted they’d had abortions. The magazine’s founder, Gloria Steinem, was among them. The latest version of their list has comedian Carol Leifer and actress Amy Brennerman as the latest victims of abortions.

Contrast that with a story about another, much more famous and talented artist. Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell became pregnant when she was an art student in 1964. She couldn’t care for the child, but didn’t kill her. In 1997, she found the daughter she had given up for adoption  32 years before.

According to the father of Ms. Mitchell’s baby, the artist never considered abortion. Mother and daughter found each other in 1997. The other famous women who had abortions could never claim a moment of grace like that in their later years.

I had an infant in 1986 when I found out I was pregnant again. The home pregnancy tests were inconclusive, so I stopped off for a free pregnancy test at a women’s clinic on the way to work one morning, not realizing that it was an abortion mill. (The clinic’s sign had a rose on it, not scissors sticking out of a baby’s skull, after all. Notice how places that perform abortions do their best to disguise what they really do.) I waited for the results of the test and a harried woman came out to tell me the test was positive.

“I’m sorry,” she said with the air of someone who might have been telling me I had cancer or herpes. “There are things we can do about it, though,” she added. My husband and I ran back to our car and his happiness at being a father again made up for all the trepidation I’d been feeling about managing two babies in less than a year. It never occurred to the woman at the clinic that we might have been happy that I was pregnant.

Our two oldest are 11 months apart and the baby whose conception the abortion-clinic worker apologized about is now a beautiful young woman who is the mother of our grandbabies. 

For facts about abortion before you consider one, click here. If you’ve had an abortion and you’re grieving, click here. If you’re pregnant and not sure what to do, click here. There are always more humane and sensible solutions than debasing yourself before God by killing your own child.

We who are mothers and grandmothers know that life truly is a gift from God. We can pray for other women who have been brainwashed to think that abortion is a solution. Remember the words of the Talmud: “Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.”